Getting to the Mountain

If there's one thing I hate it's an early morning. 7am is annoying, 6am is rough, 5am is ungodly and 4am simply doesn't exist in my world. So you can imagine my demeanor when my alarm went off at 3am the morning of our vacation. I think I shuffled to the shower, mumbled something to Chris about never booking early flights again and somehow made it to the car without really quite waking up. Our flight was SO early that the airport restaurants weren't even open yet!

Now I'm hungry, sleepy and although we booked a Continental flight, we are flying a United plane (I'm not a fan of United or the merger).

On my last trip to Orlando for Lindsay's bachelorette party (which was only 2 hours) we had little tvs on the back of the chairs in front of us and we could watch shows on the flight. So I assumed a 2.5 hour trip to Denver would have the same thing. So despite my rough morning I just knew that things would get better once I got on the plane.

But then it was time to board and we walked down the gateway... and down the stairs... and onto the runway... and back up the stairs to the plane.

A tiny airplane! I HATE tiny airplanes! Not that I'm afraid... they're just so small and cramped and without little TVs! And, as you can tell from the photo, it's still dark outside! Meaning I should still be in bed!

Somehow I survived the plane ride (and without a snack I might add) and we landed in Denver. Things were looking up!

A bank had the coolest airport ads in this airport. There were large barcodes that you can scan with your smartphone. The barcoade gives you a free book or a free sudoku puzzle. Nice!

I scanned the barcode just in case the plane ride home was just as awful (which, thankfully  it wasn't).

We then picked up our bags and I saw the neatest thing:

 It's a separate bag carousel for skis! Ingenious! Don't you just want to crawl inside and go for a ride?

I didn't... but that took some willpower.

We had about an hour to kill before meeting our friends that were coming in from New Orleans and Mobile. Technically it was not yet 10am (in fact it was a few hours shy), but we had been up for 5 hours and it was vacation so we decided one drink wasn't entirely inappropriate.

Colorado has a lot of local breweries and Chris enjoyed trying many of them throughout the vacation.

Eventually everyone made it and we were off to the Ski Haus!